Jack - A short story (S/F of a kind)

[Hare]

How often we do it?

 

Pass by the planter which holds the green fluff we think of as 'urban brightening', the weedy tree we pass on the way to work, the grass that flows down guttering that should have fallen years ago, now held in place by roots so thin it's become part of the building?

 

It started small, the movement, the changes, the new hope to heal the crumbling eco-sphere we called 'home'. Green roofs, vertical walls of rich verdant greenery, all meant to clean the air we breathe, deposited in the cities that were sprawling ever onward. 'All the land we were taking is wrong', they said; 'let's replace the water catchment area to stop the flooding, make every single roof green, make buildings vertical rainforests. Our cities from above will look like fields'....or so they said.

 

What did we get though? Half cocked ideas, spawned by men with dead eyes and smiles that had never been near a human emotion, no we got the 'quick' version. Chuck some muck on the roof and get the grant, show the water being held for an hour and you got the rubber stamp. Didn't matter if the house underneath rotted through in five years, but it was done, just in time for the great games. Oh yes, we had to show the rest of the world what we were capable of, what innovations we had here at home. But the games didn't go to plan either, the bombers saw to that, thing was no one even knew it had been done until the first reports came in months later.

 

The trees hadn't lost their leaves, in the parks some were still green, even in the dead of winter, grass continued to grow as if heated from beneath like the football pitches the public worshipped at every weekend. 'Anomaly' they said, nothing to worry about, just a small cluster of oddities. Thing was it wasn't was it? We know that now, but then...we didn't have a clue. But we did, that summer we really got the message and it was the cities that suffered the most.

 

The bombs were quite clever you see, bacteria which ate silica, excreted sugars and water retaining gels, perfect greenery food. Thing was no one knew about them until the first houses began to fall, again it was put down to 'rot from the water off the green roof' it was only when they inspected the internal cavity walls that they saw the root systems. The entire thing was honeycombed with them, anything that had a silica base had been compromised, anything with cement in it was vulnerable from attack. The plants had just taken advantage. Wimbledon was the worst disaster if you remember, that entire row going down and as for Downham....well there weren't many tears shed for that lot when it went down the same. They'd been complaining for months about the lifts not working, when they finally got to the digging out of the bodies they could see why. The bloody roots had filled the sodding shafts, there were no workings left working.

 

You see I used think like everyone else, roots and rootlets are easy to spot, but they aren't, the fine roots are 2mm wide, have you ever tried to remove something that small from your skin? Try it when it's under the skin, or in your body, you see when we lived in concrete houses and metal cars we thought it was us that ruled, that we called the shots. But we don't, we never have. There are some who've loved this whole long slow collapse, their self satisfied voices have been screaming at us from the radio. Telling us that we have to change, adapt, like the Japanese have, like the Australians have, the Chinese are still fighting, but Africa, Jesus, Africa! It's as if someone just threw a ****ing switch and the whole place just lit up with life, whoever they were, whoever made that ****ing bomb did Africa a huge ****ing favour. Because now they have green where there was desert, the weather patterns have changed too, rain falls in the once Sahara and we're getting dryer.

 

Thing is if you like the thought of being a farmer you're okay, but if you want I.T, then Canada and the U.S are your only hopes now and they've tightened the entry rules even further. They wouldn't even take the ****ing Royals, Canada left them off-shore until they had the currency in the bank. Even then they had everything burned that they came with, you see we're the transmission method, the trick was easy when you thought about it. A grey powder, released with every firework shot, fine enough to blow in the wind, a sprinkling on a thousand heads, each one from a different nation. Carrying the 'green plague' with them, adhering to skin to be shed with a layer of outer cells, all it needs is one, one skin flake, one little dose and it's in.

 

The U.S are denying they have it but we all know they do, why build a wall of steel from one coast to the other if you don't have it? Why organise your people so thoroughly if you're not readying yourself for a war you can't win. The carbon dioxide levels are dropping, quite quickly in the long term range, soon we'll be back to pre-industrial levels they say. But I can't help wonder what happens afterward, when it still keeps going. There's been rumours of another attack, a different bac-bomb, one that went off at the wrong time, France this time, Paris of all places. There's scaffolding all over the Eiffel, bamboo scaffolding, they sent for Chinese workers to do it, something about the structure they said being stressed by the amount of greenery attached to the thing.

It's not what's running through the rumour mill though, there saying the iron's being eaten away, they say it was a Yorkshireman that did it. Running through the Paris streets while being chased because his documents were false, he tripped, fell and the canister he had the stuff in smashed open in a puddle. They carted him away and the stuff went onto the wheels of the cars, liked it, stayed and bred, it used the water to spread through the city, making mats of orange gunk. What with the French weather getting warmer and wetter, all the better for the little buggers and now....well you can probably guess what's next. Pity they only shut the Channel Tunnel last week eh? Have a look at the rail tracks, those little orange scummy bits? Waste? Bog water? You make you're mind up, I know what's coming.

 

There was an old joke once, they said 'the future's orange', it isn't, it's ****ing green. There's some that have embraced it all, gone back to nature and **** in fields. Nice life if you want to die of dysentery and e.coli, the kids don't seem to mind though, who wouldn't like to live in a wood? Schools are doing okay so far, as long as the metal lasts, thing is what do you do when the metal you're using begins to drop to bits? Go back to stone?

 

Me? What do I think? Well, I'm just like you trying to get enough water to get through the day, pick up the rations from the army and defend what I can. We're okay so far, bit worried about our youngest though, she sleeps near the window, her skins got something wrong with it. Eczema they said and gave her cream, we use it but it doesn't stop the thing from spreading. Our lass knows what it is, I do too but I don't want to face it, we have to adapt they say, get used to the new world we're living in. Have a look at your own kids mate, see if you can see what I have to look at every night, rootlets, just under the skin, spreading out, a little greenish hue hidden under all that pink. She seems alright, quite healthy apart from her skin, maybe yours will be alright....my name? It's Jack, we had a joke with that we did when our house had the roof done, we renamed the house because of the lovely fuchsias that used to stream down the bricks.

 

'Jack in the Green', it made her smile for a while, but now...now I'm just Jack and it's my daughter who's going 'green'.

[De Batz]

This is another good idea, and again it reminds me of the sort of fiction that you end up reading in philosophy books because it has something to contribute to the mash-up of ideas that constitutes philosophy. It is of a piece somehow with your other writing, although the subject matter is different enough to distinguish it. I wonder perhaps whether I would make this point if I hadn't been aware that one person had written the things of yours I'd read, but here goes: the narrative voice, although different in each of the four shorts, has a similar sort of tone. Because you've chosen a certain way of telling the stories, it struck me that the first person narration (of this one) was quite similar to the more distanced third person of It Comes In Threes. It isn't a (negative) criticism, more an observation. Was this your intention?

 

On a side note, I had an idea, which I haven't been able to execute (yet), for a story about a life form that exists inside computers. Not that the computers themselves are alive, but that some sort of self-replicating code gets going well enough to protect itself and use computers as a sort of substrate for its existence. It seems like the sort of thing that you could develop better than I. Thoughts?

[Hare]

Thank you for those words, I've been told I have a definate 'voice' when I write and you can recognise my style of writing by the tone of the prose. I like to do the slightly distanced persona relating the problems they've encountered, like a conversation on a bus or train. You can see the things in your minds eye but the person talking to you has their own internal dialogue too.

 

Your idea sounds fun, there's been some authors who've had a go at the whole 'invasive sub-routine gaining awareness' thing but there's been some new direction in computing with quantum machines. Quantum machines use single molecules to compute with, and they are bound by the rules that other molecules are, as such they can do several computations at once without losing power or crashing because on a quantum level every single atom is doing several things at once! They're expecting it to be a major breakthrough when they can finally miniturize it, although the new semi-conductor material that Manchester University won the Nobel for (Graphine) has been totally embraced by the East and they're really excited about it. Graphine can be layered a molecule thick, can bend, keeps a charge and can be easily made without expensive production and equipment. Handheld computers and intelligent clothing here we come!

 

So if you see companies trying to offload the old set of silica chip sets you now know why, massive computer sales in Currys etc....lol. The thing is with your idea the whole of the internet is a kind of substrate intelligence, the amount of users and the minds behind them are kind of a gestalt entity. Look at Google, google are the worlds biggest information engine, they quickly locked onto the idea of using the actual searchers desires and gave them the information they wanted in a fast and easily used way. Like a child asking a parent a question, you could form the question and get a valid answer, other engines required you to be direct and succinct about your search, their parameters were too narrow.

Have you read Assimov? The Robots stories especially or seen 'I Robot'? He talks about the evolution of such machines, where will we draw the line between a 'thinking engine' and a 'real' life form? Even Blade Runner does that also, the Replicants are real people, with a death date just like us, thing is they know theirs.

 

I hope I've given you some avenues to have a look down and some thoughts to air, the idea is sound...why don't we both have a go at it, you pick the tone and subject and we'll try to keep it under a thousand words each? Look forward to your reply, J.